Outside Giovanni’s Produce and Grocery in El Cerrito, sweet potatoes, asparagus spears and pineapples are stacked neatly above wooden crates. On this cloudy July afternoon, a few customers eye the racks of sale produce.

“You’ve got a great deal on tomatoes,” one woman tells Pietro Bolla, Giovanni’s co-owner for two decades.

“I stole them,” he replies with a grin, and she laughs, rushing to pile more of the ripe, red fruit into a plastic bag.

Bolla knows the woman and her family. He knows many of his customers, grew up in the same neighborhood, went to school with a few. These days, he’s selling them their milk, apples and bread, even specialty olive oil, at this 21-year-old family business started by Bolla and his father, Nicolo.

“I was finishing up at Cal, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” Bolla recalled. “My dad was going through a career change and said, ‘Hey, this place is empty. Want to go for it?'”

Nicolo Bolla had been a corporate employee at Fry’s Supermarkets, now Fry’s Electronics. The grocery business was nothing new to him, or to his son.

“I watched my dad do it as long as I can remember,” Pietro Bolla said. “That was the talk around the table. I grew up around it.”

Bolla planned to help out at the store for a few months, which quickly turned into years. Recently, with his father falling ill, Bolla has taken on most of the responsibility for the business.

A typical day starts as Bolla leaves for Oakland at 5 a.m. to buy produce at a wholesale market. He gets fruit and vegetables for his store, a few special orders for local restaurants, finding deals from farmers eager to unload an overabundance of a particular item or two. Often, he is dealing with the same people his father bought from years ago.

“Having a reputation as knowledgeable, honest and able to sell their products — that’s my bread and butter.”

Bolla’s connection to his Italian heritage is clear all over the store — from the shrine to the Italian national soccer team that won the World Cup in 2006, to the specialty San Marzano canned tomatoes, to the dozens of types of pasta he keeps in stock.

“I don’t want anybody coming in asking for a cut of pasta and I don’t have it,” he said, almost too seriously.

Family history is all over Giovanni’s, too: Giovanni is Nicolo’s middle name (and Bolla’s grandmother was named Giovanna), and near the entrance, a large, 1940s family portrait of Bolla’s grandparents, uncle and his father as a baby stare down at shoppers.

Just owning and running the shop is a tribute to Bolla’s elders.

“My grandfather, also named Pietro, was a sharecropper in North Richmond,” Bolla said. “Back in the 1920s, he did the same thing — drove down San Pablo Avenue, back when it was a dirt road, to the Oakland market. It took five hours with a horse and buggy full of beans and squash and whatever else they grew.”

Before the Bolla family acquired the business, the Liberty Street store had several identities as different grocery stores and bakeries, Bolla said. The store was once named Poloni’s — and the building is still owned by Gene Poloni — and changed names and owners a few times after that.

“This will never be the place people do all their weekly shopping, but there are a lot of things you can get here that you won’t find anywhere else,” he said. “A lot of people know me. They know my father. They trust us.”